The cerebral blood-vessels in health and disease. By Prof. H. Obersteiner (Vienna). Brain 1884: 7; 289 309 (Translated from the original manuscript by C.E. Beevor, MD).

Abstract

Writing in the 1880s, advances in microscopy and the preservation and staining of tissue made over the previous decade have enabled the fine structure and elements of animal and human tissue to be described in health …‘but also revealed an increasing number of changes, which denote the impress of a pathological condition’. Sceptics have challenged the status of certain so-called pathological features arguing that these may be variations of normal structure, non-specific alterations that accompany ageing or other ‘physiological’ processes, or artefacts of tissue handling. Indeed, in his previous work on the cerebral vasculature—motivated by the consideration that ‘the nervous elements, and especially the ganglion cells, are more sensitive than any other tissues to disturbances of their normal nutrition’—Professor Obersteiner (Fig. 1) has ‘frequently found that the occurrence of vessels considered to be diseased, [has] afterwards been found present, and never absent, in every healthy brain … such a false explanation brings in its train a series of false conclusions, and often in consideration of very great importance’. Fig. 1 Professor Heinrich Obersteiner (1847–1922). His studies are of fresh cerebral vessels, minimally prepared—no more than four days, ideally less, immersion of brain or spinal cord blocks in a solution of bichromate of potash. This allows the intact vessels to be separated from the macerated parenchyma and—after staining with carmine, picrocarmine, haematoxylin or aniline dyes (but not glycerine or oil of cloves)—examined in water or very weak salt solution, sealed with damar-lac at the edges of the coverslip, for up to 10 years. Only rarely is it necessary to harden the vessel prior to sectioning for examination of certain pathological conditions. Normal arterial vessels consist of four coats (Fig. 2). The endothelium provides a single layer of flattened cells with oval nuclei orientated along the direction of blood flow …‘nearly always at the …